


刻骨銘心

by yeolee



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, HSO
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-23
Updated: 2012-06-23
Packaged: 2017-11-08 09:01:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/441502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yeolee/pseuds/yeolee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In your hands is a cup of tea. Within it reflects eternity. </p><p>Will you drink?</p>
            </blockquote>





	刻骨銘心

**Author's Note:**

> Written for HSO 2012, Bonus Round 1.  
> Prompt: Dave<3Aradia: Wuxia + weird fiction.
> 
> Also, fun explanation for the title! 刻骨銘心 is an idiom; it literally translates into "carved in bones and engraved in heart" but more or less translates into "unforgettable".

A woman in white pours you a drink.

“This is the five flavored tea of forgetfulness,” she says. “Drink and forget your last life so you may pass into the next.”

With casual irreverence, you press the cup to your mouth. The tea tastes bitterly pungent, salty and sour with only the thinnest layer of sweetness to cover the flavor, but that’s the least of your worries right now. Already, you can feel your memories slipping away with each and every swallow. Her name (whose name?) and her face (whose face?) are fading fast, and you prickle with anxiety. There’s something you must do, something you must remember, and if nothing else, you have to -

(-- --- ----- --- -- _st_ –- _op_ )

\- and then deep inside your skull, something resounds like a thundering knell. Your hands shake, droplets of tea splattering to the floor.

“Careful,” the woman says. Her eyes are calm, but her sharp smile promises an eternity of horrors. “Unless you desire to face the wrath of the gods in your next life, be mindful of how you drink.”

Your shoulders tense, right hand twitching to your side to grasp – grasp what? It escapes you, but you know it should feel heavy and solid in your hands, hot like metal and cold like fire, but you’ve forgotten, oh you’ve forgotten, and there’s nothing but cool air against sweaty palms. You can’t run, can’t fight, and the only thing you can do is drink and so you do, your tongue burning with each razed memory. When you finish the cup, you are nothing but a scorched shell, as hollow as the day you were born.

But this time you are not born empty.

 

* * *

 

Your brother once said you were born a ghost.

His words, as off-handed as they were, are unintentionally prophetic. Although your blood-red eyes and starlit hair has always set you apart, you grow up haunted by something you cannot name. Life turns you in circular spirographs, repeating your every action until you feel like you’ve done everything a hundred times. Other times, it feels you’ve lived a hundred different lives, all compressed into one. Although the phantom repetitions set you on edge, it doesn’t scare you.

(-- --- ----- - _he l_ \--- --- _p_ )

While the darkness of the world is escapable, the darkness within is not. Something lives inside your bones.

Between each beat of your heart is a tiny heartbeat pause, as if someone residing inside your lungs was breathing too. It lasts for only half a second, but each beat fills you with a great and terrible feeling of dislocation, stretching out between your ribs in a chasm you cannot cross. Within each pause, you can sometimes hear a fragmented echo; it’s incomprehensible at best, but the yawning sense of loss is unambiguous.

You never tell your brother though. There’s no need for it anyways - your clenched fists convey your anxiety better than what words could ever say. On your fourth birthday, he tosses you a sword and teaches you how to fight.

For the next twelve years, you grow up on a steady diet of morning ambushes and inescapable duels. You learn about righteousness and honor, of when to keep fighting and when to give in. If nothing else, the terrifying consequence of avoiding rooftop strifes quickly beats the lesson into you. It’s a tough life of sore muscles and sorer bruises, but it’s a good life. However, you soon discover that no matter what you do, you can never really escape the tiny heartbeat pause; it's only inevitable that the darkness of the world eventually catches up too. On New Year’s Day, you find your brother dead on the floor, stabbed through with his own sword.

For the longest time, you do nothing but crouch next to his body. Are you feeling shock? Grief? Rage? You don’t know. You know nothing but desolate stillness.

When night falls, you finally move. With shaking hands, you yank the sword from your brother’s body; it slides out with a sickening squelch.

The next morning, you leave your home, bloody sword clenched tightly in your hand.

 

* * *

 

On the fifteenth day of the first month, you meet a girl by the river. Beneath the vermillion lanterns, she stands a fairy in red, ephemeral and half-real.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she says. Instantly, you draw your sword. Her eyebrows lift in surprise, but her hand does not twitch to the blade strapped to her side.

( _do not_ \----- --- ---- ----)

“I’m not the one you seek,” she says, “At least, not yet.”

Your immediate reaction is incredulity - _what the fuck_ , _what the hell is going on here_ , followed by a few rude gestures and a _who the hell are you_ because while you’ve met a lot of mysterious assholes in your life, she takes the cake with her serene enigma. But what really unsettles you the morbid familiarity in the slope of her shoulders and the gleam in her eyes; you know this girl like a map, every latitudinal curve of her body and longitudinal wave of her hair, and you don’t even know her name.

Against your better judgment, you don’t do an acrobatic pirouette off the handle. Instead, you flatly mutter “What the fuck.”

“You’ll understand soon enough,” she replies with a patient smile, “I’m Aradia.”

After a moment’s hesitation, you sheathe your sword. As unsettling as she is, there’s a familiar echo in her words that’s different from the usual itch of monotonous repetition. Instead, there is a tug that reverberates throughout your soul, reaching out to even the darkest corners where something mysterious sleeps.

(A woman on a dark horse. Fortunes of calamitous fire. You have a lantern in your hands and you cast it to the sky.

As you watch it disappear into the black void, she turns to you and says _may your life be more fortuitous in the next_.)

“Dave,” you say and deep down, you suspect that she’s already knows your name, always has known your name and that maybe, just maybe, you have always known hers too, but by the time the words leave your lips, it’s too late – she’s long gone, swept away with the thousands of red lanterns drifting into the night sky.

When you go to sleep that night, a face comes forth from the darkness, incomprehensible and chilling. It’s unfathomably alien but undeniably familiar, and you wake up in cold sweat. Even though you couldn’t catch a clear glimpse, you know the face backwards and forwards, as intimately as the back of your hand, and the thought terrifies you more than anything in the world.

Sleep doesn’t come easy after that.

 

* * *

 

On the fifth day of the fourth month, you find Aradia at the ancestral burial grounds. She lights up the incense sticks as the rain drizzles around you, each ( _d_ \- --- - _ri_ \-- --- ---- --- _p_ ) a teardrop from the crying sky.

(Chrysanthemums on a grave, paper burning in a fire. Someone has hung a willow branch over the temple door.)

She eyes it and laughs, _I will not be warded away so easily_.)

“What are you doing here?” you ask.

“I came to see you,” Aradia replies.

“Why?” you ask and for a second, there’s nothing but quiet. It’s an unsettling quiet though, one devoid of emptiness and full of blurry sound, bleached out noises like the voices of the dead creeping through the air and into your skin. The hair on the back of your neck prickles.

“What I want is not important,” Aradia finally answers. She turns to stare at you, her gaze heavy with the weight of infinity. “What you want is more important.”

And then, quietly but surely, the carefully crafted indifference you walk and talk with slips away and in that moment, you are just Dave, sixteen years old, all nervous angles and pinched smiles, throat tight with the weight of grief. “I want my brother back,” you say, swallowing audibly.

“You can’t bring back the dead,” she replies matter-of-factly.

“I know,” you interrupt quickly, “I just - I don’t know.”

“Do you want to avenge him?” she asks and even though you do not reply, she sees the answer in your eyes. “You aren’t ready to face Jack Noir right now. I can help you prepare.”

“Really,” you say and her lips curve upwards.

“Even though it seems we have little in common, we in fact have very much,” she says cheerfully, “Just trust me!”

(In your hands is a cup of wine. Reflected within the surface are full moon eyes, half-moon smiles.

 _Let’s_ \-- --- drink --- ---- ---- _to us_ , she says with a laugh.)

You know you shouldn’t - she’s unsettling in ways you can’t explain and you barely evenly know her - but her smile lingers in places both familiar and strange, and you say yes before you can stop yourself.

When you do, Aradia’s face splits into a grin that’s brilliant and blinding, almost even terrifying, as if all the light in the world was pouring out of something utterly cosmic and divine, and you can’t bring yourself to care. For the first time in many weeks, the ghostly space between ribcage feels a little less like darkness and a little more like light.

 

* * *

 

On the seventh day of the seventh month, everything changes.

For months now, Aradia has lived by your side in cheerful serenity. She doesn’t just humor your jokes, but patiently listens and laughs, even when she doesn’t understand everything you say. Even when she teaches you how to fight, she does so with a patience as endless as time. But most of all, she fills you to the brim with warm happiness. It almost scares you how pervasive the light of her smile is.

And for months now, the skeletal grasp of shadowy loss becomes more and more real. During the day, it prickles in your ribcage, beating louder and louder with each passing. During the night, the face that haunts your sleep grows sharper still, until one you day you see it clear: moon-shaped and ashy-pale, elegantly curved cheekbones and almond eyes that shine ink black and peony red. The face is terrifying, ancient luminescence and depthless darkness trapped in a human frame, but under all the unearthliness, it is undeniably recognizable: the face is Aradia’s.

You wake up shaking. All along, the shadowy breath within your veins and the face that haunted your dreams has all been the same, alive in the girl sitting by your side. Even though Aradia is soft smiles and softer curves, she is as much a monster as she is a girl. You wonder how you could have missed all the signs – skin like ashen tombstones, teeth as white as bleached bones, the way her hair doesn’t reflect the gleam of the stars but inverts it instead, refracting the darkness into her wavy curls – the little things that made her unearthly presence even more unreal. How could you have not noticed?

(A bridge of stars, a flock of magpies. Like Zhinu, she descended from the heavens in a shower of stars. But this is not your legend - you were never cursed by circumstance as much as much as you were entangled by human mistake.

 _Listen closely and_ \-- --- ------ - _he_ – _a_ \-- - _r_ \-- my words, she says, _And you will remember me in your next life, as I remember you_.)

Is she a ghost? Is she a god? What do you call something that haunts your life so thoroughly that it lives in every breath you take? What do you do when the darkness that lurks within is not some indefinable monster, but a vibrant fairy of a girl whose laughter lights up your world? There are no good answers.

“So, what are you exactly? Some kind of ghost fairy?” you ask after a moment of silence.

“Yes and no,” she replies, “I was once human. Who knows what I am now?”

“I figured as much,” you say and Aradia hesitates, apprehensive and excited.

“How much do you remember?” she asks.

“Not much. Just bits and pieces,” you reply and that much is true. The flashes of unknown memory are still fragmented and dusty, like you’ve been staring through fogged glass layered in thick dusty layers of dream and time, but one thing has always been constant: she is always there. Always has been and always will be.

For a moment, you want to crack a joke but you see the apprehension in her eyes and fuck, you didn’t know ghosts and gods could look so scared until now. It tugs at you, deep in your chest where her heart beats in time with yours and for once, you reply truthfully, plain and simple, with no lies or sarcastic remarks. “I mostly remember you.”

You tell her about wine cups and temple grounds, of the burning taste of something more bitter than sweet, and then haltingly and briefly, about the ghost in your ribcage and the shadow that plagues your sleep. Although you don’t tell her everything, she reads between the lines easily enough.

“I never wanted to hurt you,” she sighs, earnestly and painfully sincere, “It’s just that I’ve been trapped on earth so long that I thought that if you remembered everything, things would be easier.”

You have nothing to say to that; easier isn’t the word you’d pick to describe the haunting repetition in every dialogue and action or the phantom heartbeats spaced between yours.

“Does it bother you?” she asks and you wonder, does it? She is beauty and she is terror, but she’s happiness too. She suffuses you from skin to bone with radiant warmth, and lights up the desolate space within your chest. Every beat of your heart is hers too.

“No,” you say. It is as much a truth as it is a lie.

( _May this be_ \-- --- ----- the last ---- _time we part_.)

When she leans in to kiss you, her lips are corpse-cold.

 

* * *

 

On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, Aradia finds you lying in a pool of blood.

Although you’ve grown up with a sword in your hand, your blade has never truly been put to the test until you fought Jack; the man is liquid negrocity, primal and feral, all slick darkness and pitch-black snarls, but he is only mortal. By the end of the fight, he lies dead at your feet. It doesn’t really matter though as you are dying too.

When Aradia arrives, you can barely see her against the darkened sky. All you can make out is a smear of red, the reddest of reds you have ever seen.

“The decision is up to you,” she whispers as she leans in close, “If you wish to remember me again, just remember what I said before.”

And then, with her soft hands around your face, she kisses you gentle and deep until there’s nothing but fluttering eyelashes and voluptuous curves; the world is Aradia and Aradia is the world, and you are falling at the speed of light into her ghostly radiance.

“Whatever choice you make, I will be waiting for you,” she whispers against your lips.

(In your hands is a cup of tea. Within it, reflects eternity.

Will you drink it? Every last -- --- ----- --- ---- _drop_?)

This will not be the last time you see her; the string of destiny entwined around your ankle, bright like your eyes and dark like her lips, means you will always meet.

As lotus-shaped lanterns bear you down to hell, you close your eyes. Darkness swallows you whole.

\-------

When you open your eyes again, you find yourself sitting in the terrace of the venerable old lady, the Goddess Meng Po.

“We meet again,” she says. Her smile is as terrifying as it is sublime. “Do not think of cheating this time. I’ll be watching carefully to make sure you drink it all.”

Without hesitation, you tip the cup into your mouth. The waters of oblivion slide down your throat like liquid jade and this time, you swallow it all.

( _do not drink the last drop_ )

It doesn’t matter anyways. Whether in this life or the next, Aradia will always find you.


End file.
